In a famous photograph of W.E.B. Du Bois with Mao Zedong, both men are absolutely giddy and dressed to the nines: big smiles, stylish hats, long wool coats. That picture—and the 20th-century Afro-Asian alliances it symbolizes—was something of an impetus for “The Great Camouflage,” a show on view at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai through April 26.

Co-curators X Zhu-Nowell and Kandis Williams began with a shared interest in overlapping revolutionary histories and cross-cultural solidarities. It started out as a show about racial capitalism and the role Marxist thought played in anti-imperialist movements—and those are still key themes. But along the way, the curators came across the work of so many women whose contributions, in art and in activism, were overshadowed by the men they married, among them Shirley Du Bois, Eslanda Robeson, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Suzanne Césaire, and Grace Lee Boggs.…